The BeagleBone was great when it first came out. Then the Raspberry Pi came out, and has a bigger community, higher performance, and lower price. Compared to the RPi 3, the BBBW seems like ... too little, too late?
Switched to a RPi2 after that headache. The BBB has been collecting dust ever since.
Simply swapping the micro-usb connector would have broken that (because it's larger).
Well, the RAM on the Bone is DDR3 while the RAM on the RPi3 is DDR2. I'll generally take the extra performance over an extra 512MB.
With respect to USB3, USB Type-C connectors are WAY more expensive than micro-B. We're talking like more than a dollar vs less than 10 cents. And USB Type-C cables are way more expensive, too. And you'd still only be doing USB 2.0 speeds anyhow.
I doubt Type-C USB is going to be making it into this space anytime soon.
I'm also generally unconvinced the Type-C scaremongering is real. Difficulty now is high, costs are high, but it still doesn't seem as impervious a barrier as many people intone.
That's fine, but most embedded things can't even do USB high speed. So why incur the cost of USB 3.0 when they can't even use USB 2.0 to the fullest?
*LPDDR2
Edit: A warning about the TPS65217C on the BBB. The power supply needs to come up in (I think 50ms) or it'll fail to boot.
USB+ethernet both use the same connection to the CPU, and it's a USB-OTG implementation basically hacked to act like a USB host, but it's possible to host the filesystem there.
Lower price. And that's what drove almost everything.
The RPI very much does NOT have higher performance.
Simple things like "How fast can I toggle that pin?" can make you think so because the RPi's are "closer to the metal".
(The Rpi1 was slower, but the BBBW is up against the Pi3, and previous ones against Pi2.)
Um, sure, but if that's your benchmark, you'd want an ODROID-C2 instead, no?
The problem I have with the RPi3 is that it's rare that I am CPU bound (and there are better choices if I am), while I am far more often I/O bound. And the RPi I/O system (Still hanging Ethernet off the USB? Only one PWM pin? Really?) is sub-par.
However, to each their own. The level of choice is wonderful from the perspective of someone who had to fight making a board at $200 4 years ago that didn't even reach near the level of the initial RPi.
And if I want absolute-lowest-price, CHIP is still where it's at, unless I can stretch as low as the ESP8266, but then we're no longer in the same category.
So, anyway, I'm not particularly excited about yet another beaglebone that's two or three times too expensive for what it is, in singles. Others have differing needs/opinions.